Most organized retail crime cases fall apart because the paperwork underneath couldn't carry the weight. Don Carr and Jim Cords dig into a truth most store-level operators never hear: the incident report isn't what you do after the real work, it's the deliverable. The ORC cases that reach a task force or a prosecutor are built on a pattern, and that pattern is only as strong as the individual write-ups feeding it. A clean one becomes part of something bigger; a vague one is a dead end with a case number. The one thing fully in an operator's control: treat every write-up like the first piece of a case that doesn't exist yet.